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| "It's a surprise!" |
Joey tried on a few parts, but he decided pretty quickly that it was best being Papa 'Murf, and so the laboratory is his, and he joyously throws his bottles of wart potion and love tonic at Gargamel.
Alex has gravitated toward Jokey, and Ella made him an ingenious prop as well, a little gift box filled with a hundred of those firework snaps that pop when you throw them on the ground, which you can always find for sale at the little newspaper Kiosk at our train station.
As happy as the kids were at home, they were equally unhappy when it was time to leave the house. But we'd made plans to take Brie and Geoff downtown, so that they could do a little souvenir shopping and see the city, and I hated to send our guests off alone. But I have to acknowledge that I'm not doing a very good job of giving the kids the space and freedom that they're longing for, especially Alex. So I shouldn't have been surprised when he started getting punchy.
But luckily he got some more time to himself at the Franz Carl Weber Store. They've restored their train table, and Alex and Joey and Kael spent a good part of their visit there (while Ella combed the store for useful Smurf paraphernalia). The table was crowded when they arrived, but one little boy was dominating the play: he fixed Joey with an evil stare and imperiously gathered all of the trains and hoarded them while his grandparents wrung their hands and pleaded with him to share. Joey assessed the situation bluntly: "Momma, that not a nice boy." You wouldn't believe it, but I can muster a pretty good evil stare of my own, and I Robin Hooded the trains back to the cowed boys around the table.
People watching at the toy store is fun: in particular, I'm always interested to see how different parents deal with children who whine in toy-lust or who don't want to leave the store. Today, one mother, whose boy really didn't want to leave the table, solved the problem by asking one of the clerks where she could buy an identical train set for home. They didn't have exactly the same set for sale, it was explained, but they did sell a starter Brio set for 200 CHF. The mother asked if the set was as big as the one on the table: it wasn't, and so she took two starter sets and then was able to convince her son that it was time for lunch. True story!
But I have my own failings as a mother, and one of these is a stubborn loathing of renegotiating and revising a plan, even in the face of kid-strife. My children had just been across four countries, and all they really wanted to do was sit at home with their toys. And so I don't know why I was surprised when they started waving their free balloons from the toy store like lunatics as they walked down the street, bludgeoning one another with them whenever they thought they could get away with it. I soon had three large, confiscated balloons dangling from the back of my stroller, and my kids were told that I'd be spending exactly no money on them at the gummy bear store, our next stop.
Lucky for them, there was a delicious loop hole: the store is generous with the free samples, and after they'd gotten the nod from me, the kids gobbled these happily. The seemed to have some sense of getting away with something, and this improved all their moods. Joey, clutching his bears, fell contentedly asleep.
My kids aren't the only ones who were tired: Brie seems to have caught Kael's flu, and she finally surrendered to her need to nap. So we headed back to the Hauptbahnhof. But while Brie and Geoff were grabbing a little chocolate to add to their pile of souvenirs and gifts, Ella noticed an advertisement for the new Smurf movie, and drifted off across the hall to look at it. But I didn't know that at the time: all I knew, in a flash of panic, was that my daughter was suddenly gone, disappeared in the largest train station in Switzerland.
I left Geoff with my boys and made a mad dash around the immediate area, and then I asked him and Brie to take Alex to my home with them, just in case Ella, who knows which train to take back to our house, had decided to go there. And then I took Joey and continued my mad dash.
But it was only when I slowed down and took a breath that I saw Ella. She hadn't gone far at all: I found her just a few steps from where I'd been standing, leaning casually against a pillar with fear in her eyes. She, too had thought that she'd drifted too far and was lost, and so she'd tucked herself quietly away from the eyes of strangers and was doing her best to look cool and knowledgeable. "I know I look older than eight," she told me, "so I was trying to look like a girl who knew what she was doing."
I know the feeling: I usually try to look like a mom who knows what she's doing, but sometimes I can't quite pull it off.
I took my babies home, and released them into the house and yard where they were relieved to resume their smurfing until dinner.
Brie and Geoff and Kael and Juniper rejoined us, refreshed, after their naps, and we had a wonderful time hanging out with them this evening. Joey, because he'd had a long nap in his stroller, got to stay up late to play with his little friend, and the two of them finally negotiated their way into playing a game of "break the hot wheels car track with the sword."
It's so interesting, watching the two of them. They're almost exactly the same age, but Kael, as an oldest child, is more verbal than Joey, but Joey, with the wisdom that you gain from having an older brother and sister, loves to take charge. He was clearly reveling in having someone to boss around a little, instructing his friend, "Hit it like this, 'Kay? No, not that! Like this? 'Kay? 'Kay?!" But he had a right to sound authoritative. If there's one thing my two-year-old is an expert at, it's mass destruction.
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| Dennis, taking refuge in a makeshift helm during a sword fight with Joey. |
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